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A celebrated book and a major museum exhibition revealed the harrowing tale behind the image of a wounded Marine. Their version was wrong. ============================================================== The fighting in Hue City, Vietnam, was as intense and confusing as anything the Marines there had ever seen. It was mid-February 1968, and American and South Vietnamese forces were desperately trying to counter a surprise onslaught that became known as the Tet offensive. First Battalion, Fifth Marines had breached the city’s historic Citadel. Radio communications were out. From front-line positions, Marines ran back a block or two to give updates to commanding officers and to...

(Warning: You May Find Some Of This Offensive And Or Disturbing) "...We have been here now for twelve and one half hours by my reckoning and we still don't know who the next President of the United States is...." NBC Anchorman Chet Huntley At 7 AM Eastern Time Wednesday November 6, 1968- I was watching Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on the morning of Wednesday November 6th, 1968 as I awoke around 7 am from a short nights sleep for an eight year old, probably not much more than four and a half hours. We still didn't know who the...

Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by a racist gunman. Friday, we learned the identity of the crazed criminal who mailed pipe bombs to a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. From restaurants to Capitol corridors, this campaign season we have seen ugly face-offs between leftist radicals and Republican senators. Are we more divided than we have ever been? Are our politics more poisoned? Are we living in what...

This week, the Miss America Organization announced that it’s eliminating the swimsuit competition in an effort to focus less on women’s appearances. It’s not clear what, exactly, the beauty pageant will be about now that it’s trying to deemphasize the “beauty” part. In any case, the decision coincides with the 50th anniversary of a feminist protest that criticized the contest as a sexist “cattle auction.” The Miss America pageant has courted controversy ever since it began as a 1921 newspaper “bathing beauties” contest and marketing scheme for Atlantic City, New Jersey. In the beginning, the controversy stemmed from conservative critics...

Fifty years ago tonight, a great American political party was murdered by its own children and closest friends. The party in question was the Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and JFK, which perished during the riots in Grant Park, Chicago, on the night of Aug. 28, 1968, in the midst of the party’s national convention. Its children in this case were the rioters from the anti–Vietnam War Left. After killing off the traditional liberal Democratic party they despised, they would go on to take over the corpse and make it the host of America’s radical Left, from Jerry...

…..He's "really concerned," just as most people who don't know anything about politics are. It's interesting that he mentioned violence in the streets on this, the 50th anniversary of the "Days of Rage" that blew up the Democratic convention in 1968. That convention and the violence that surrounded it defined the New Left and that generation of activists. So could it really happen today? Those were entirely different times. America was a different country, young people were different, and the issues were a matter of life and death for many. As much as the left tries to gin up hysteria...

Back in London, at the piano in his Cavendish Avenue bachelor pad, Paul played it for John and Yoko. When he got to the line “The movement you need is on your shoulder,” he told them, “I’ll change that, it’s a bit crummy.” John replied, “That’s the best line in it!” John heard this new tune as Paul cheering him on in his romance with Yoko. “I took it very personally,” John told Rolling Stone in 1968. “‘Ah, it’s me,’ I said. ‘It’s me.’ He says, ‘No, it’s me.’ I said, ‘Check. We’re going through the same bit.’ So we...

In August 1968 Soviet tanks rolled into communist Czechoslovakia to crush a burgeoning democratic reform movement known as the Prague Spring. Here is a recap of the shock intervention that reined in the Soviet satellite state, its aspirations for democracy warded off for another 20 years. "At 11:00 pm, Soviet, Polish, East German, Bulgarian and Hungarian troops crossed the Czechoslovak border," AFP reported early on August 21, picking up Radio Prague's announcement of the overnight invasion. Tensions had been mounting between then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the reformist government that had taken over in the Central European state. In...

Here is pop nugget from the past that only more "seasoned" Freepers will remember. Released in 1967, it was a Top 30 hit in America and had an otherworldly vibe to it. Very trippy and psychedelic. I can almost picture Frank asking his daughter what the hell she and Lee were smoking to come up with this one. I was just a small boy when this was popular but I remember hearing it on the radio. The accompanying video I linked here has a post apocalyptic "Planet of the Apes" feel to it. I did not discover the video until...

Foster Brooks roast of Hubert Humphrey

1968 - A Year When Many in the Church Drank the Poison of the World Msgr. Charles Pope • June 19, 2018 • Corner of 7th & N Street NW, Washington D.C., April 8, 1968There was something awful about the year 1968. Fifty years later we are still reeling from its effects. Perhaps we do well to ponder the deep wounds that still fester today.I was a young lad at the time, and almost everything I saw on the television news terrified me. Harrowing nightly reports from Vietnam (where my father was stationed) detailed that day’s casualties; I always...

"heads lying in pools of blood. The calmest one in the room was Ethel (Kennedy). Robert Kennedy had a rosary in his hand, at one point he asked the people to stand aside to give him air.....there was an awful lot of excitement and an awful lot of confusion and hysteria among practically everyone here....." NBC reporter Charles Quinn describes the scene when Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles early in the morning of June 5, 1968 "get the gun Rafer" Radio reporter Andrew West as the struggle with assassin Sirhan Sirhan is underway In the early hours of...

(Warning: Some readers may find some passages to be disturbing) "And here's to you Mrs. Robinson, Jesus Loves You more than you will know....whoa whoa whoa" At the end of May in 1968 I went into the kitchen, sat down and ate my breakfast before heading off to school hearing those words over and over again. Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" was a hit song, at the top of the charts, being played on the radio in my kitchen and radios everywhere. It connected with me where I was, a child eight years old, with "dee dee's" and "dah, dah's",...

"I have come to think of my role as one which operates outside the realm of partisan politics raising the issues and through action create the situation which forces whatever party is in power to act creatively and constuctively in response to the dramatic presentations of these issues on the public scene..." Dr. Martin Luther King expresses no interest in being a 1968 presidential candidate-April 25, 1967 I had watched the evening news on NBC ("The Huntley-Brinkley Report") and was aware that this person Martin Luther King was in Memphis getting himself involved in a garbage workers strike. His dramatic...

Rhonda James (Source: WMC Action News 5) __________________________________________________________________________________________________ MEMPHIS, TN (WMC) - Rhonda James has been living with a painful secret for 50 years. "It was just what my mother wanted, my parents wanted for us. She wanted us to go on and go to school and go to college and have a regular life." James is a grandmother who has lived in Memphis her whole life. She was 8 years old in 1968 when the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Memphis to support the Memphis sanitation workers in their strike for higher wages and better working...

From: Jake Sullivan To: Hillary Clinton Date: 2012-06-11 06:13 Subject: CHICAGO UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05791181 Date: 11/30/2015 RELEASE IN FULL From: Sullivan, Jacob J Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 1:13 PM To: Subject: FW: Chicago FYI Original Message From: Rubin, Barnett R Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 1:12 PM To: Sullivan, Jacob J Subject: Chicago Reading the Secretary's remarks at Wellesley, I realized that we both participated in the August 1968 demonstrations at the DNC in Chicago. We also both went through the Panther/Cambodia demos at Yale in 1970, but I was arrested...

The official anniversary of the Tet Offensive is January 30th, the day it began, but it was on this day that network television news (the cutting edge most important news source 50 years ago today) was able to bring viewers dramatic and startling footage of the Vietcong suicide attack on the US Embassy in Saigon. The attack came at around 3am Saigon time but there was no live video capability in 1968 from Vietnam. The films of the attack were put on airplanes and sent to locations like Hong Kong or Tokyo where they could be sent via satellite earth...

Christmas Eve, 1968. As one of the most turbulent, tragic years in American history drew to a close, millions around the world were watching and listening as the Apollo 8 astronauts - Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders - became the first humans to orbit another world.

What are the claims about Ukrainian meddling in the election? Some conservative personalities within and without the White House have been talking a lot lately about the links between Ukraine and Hillary Clinton's campaign. Their relationship was exposed by Politico reporter Ken Vogel, who has since moved to The New York Times, back in January. But some on the right are talking about it again in defense of Donald Trump Jr., who has been roundly criticized for meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer in the hopes of getting dirt on Clinton from the Russian government. White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah...